Programming

If you are a senior Java developer anywhere in the US and are interested in moving to Boulder, I’d like to hear from you . There was a nice article in Bloomberg Businessweek last week about Why Boulder Is America’s Best Town for Startups. With the combination of the new startup activity over the past few years combined with the rapid growth of a number of medium sized companies and renewed hiring from some of the outposts of major tech companies based here, we’ve clearly entered another cycle in Boulder where talent is tight and demand for senior folks is once again at a high point. ...

In the continuation of the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater, I asked them a few questions about which web sites, books, and blogs they consumed at the beginning of their journey when they knew nothing about programming. It turns out that Nate and Natty spent most of their time simply searching for what they were looking for. Whenever a specific topic came up, they’d use Google, be patient when reading through the search results and forums, refine their search, and keep trying. They discovered that there are an amazing number of programmers who publish code on their personal blogs. As they were trying to get basic stuff to work, they spent time searching for and then reading the full posts and comments. ...

To start off the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater, I asked them the simple question “What Was Day 1 Like?” Nate responded first: Day one was totally overwhelming. Overwhelming because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. It’s one thing when you don’t know how to do something (e.g., validate email addresses or change a button’s hover state). But we didn’t know what we needed to learn, and that made it difficult to even start down a path. The first week was spent just googling “web site design”, “web site architecture” and “web server” to try to get a handle on all of the acronyms we were coming across (such as CSS, HTML PHP MYSQL, ROR, JS, AJAX). Our goal was to piece together the list of skills that we were going to collectively learn in order to create a web service like Everlater. ...

I had lunch today with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola , the co-founders of Everlater, a TechStars 2009 company. Nate and Natty are two of my favorites – not only because they regularly kick my partner Seth Levine’s ass on bike rides but also because they starred in last year’s TechStars The Founders video series. Today, while enjoying a veggie burger at Mustard’s Last Stand , we talked about how Nate and Natty learned to program. When they came up with the idea for Everlater, they were both young finance geeks on wall street. Nate was a math major; Natty was a econ major, but neither had a clue how to build a web app. They decided that rather than find a “developer” to team up with, they would learn how to program. ...